Did you create a separate /home partition at install time? The normal practice in UNIX-like OS's is to store all user data in /home/<username> and deviations from this are likely to cause problems unless you know *exactly* what you're doing.

If you didn't make a separate /home, one was created for you under /. Nothing wrong with this in principle, but it makes upgrading a bit harder.

On my Mint-10 RC installation I have a separate data partition called /stor and also mount the root partitions of two other linuxes (to be able to compare things in /etc) without any difficulty: they're auto-mounted silently. I don't try to use them in lieu of /home though, which you imply that you are doing.

I have two data paritins. And I am multi-booting several Linux distros.One data partition is mounted on ' /home . and the other is mounted on ' /media/sda9 'I set these up when I install a distro and at the partition selection table , on the second one I manually type in the mount point ( /media/sda9 ) . You can spell this mount point any way you like , and the installer will create a directory exactly the way you spell it. The Mint installer by default makes this data partition mount point with permissions for Group=plugdev and by default makes the sudo User a member of the group ' plugdev '. This allows the suo User to read and write to that data parttion. If you add a second User , then if you want that User too read and write to the second data pafrtitiion you must make that User a member of the group ' plugdev '.

When operating , if you want to sve a file there , you specify the mount directory on the file tree list.My data partition happens to be formatted exgt4. This means that an odd distro suc h as LM Gloria ( with ext3 ) cannot read it because it was not built with ext4 capability